Monday, October 24, 2005

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Don't worry, be happy. The famous mantra of Mr. Bobby McFerrin from his song in the 1980's. This really fit the conversation at the bar the other evening. There was a young co-ed at the bar who was in some distress and bewilderment about her chosen college degree and whether or not that this was what she really wanted to do for the rest of her life. It was ovious that the degree that she was persuing was not making her happy. I often think that we all have to make life long career decisions way too early in our lives. We quite often wind up doing what our parents or grandparents programed into us from a very early age. Not everyone needs to go to college straight out of high school. I believe that getting a job and experiencing life for a couple of years would aide more people in making the proper life choices. There is no way that most seventeen or eighteen year olds know what they want to do for the rest of their lives. I have seen so many people come into the bar in the evenings after work and you can tell that they are miserable with their lives and jobs. They feel trapped by the constraints of marriage or family or even if they are single, they have spent so much money getting to where they are that they can't afford to quit and persue what would really make them happy.
I have been lucky, I suppose in that I have been able to follow my heart and work at several different careers in my life. I have worked as a geologist, and environmental chemist, a photographer, a farm and rancher, a dairyman, an owner/chef of a couple of restaurants and a bar owner to name some of them. Sometimes the most unexpected things will bring you enormous satisfaction and joy. When I was much younger, before I bought the laboratory where I was working, my wife and I found ourselves with our second newborn daughter at home we found ourselves in need of more income. In a strange turn of events, serendipity I suppose, a dairyman that I had been doing feed analysis for called me one day and asked me if there was anyway that I could help him out. All of his milking staff had left him to go home to Mexico for a while to visit their families. Always up for new and strange challenges, I said sure, when do you need me? Be out here about three-thirty tomorrow morning and we will get started. Boy, did we get started. Three-thirty the next morning found me standing in a milking barn with 225 bovine ladies standing outside the door with swollen udders, waiting impatiently to give up their liquid treasure. We finished the last group of cows about seven-thirty in the morning and it was time for me to head home, take a quick shower and go to work at the lab. Ed asked me to be back about four in the afternoon. Four-thirty was about the best I could do and still keep my lab bosses happy. Four thirty came and it was time to slap the milking machines back on the ladies once more. In the evenings I stayed later and helped him clean the milking parlor and bottle feed about twenty five baby calves. I would then stop at my farm on the way home, check on my livestock and then go home to shower once more and fall into bed about eleven thirty and get back up about two-fortyfive to start the day all over again. Maybe this is why to this day I prefer small breated women. I have spent enough time with big boobs. This went on seven days a week, the only difference being that the laboratory was closed on weekends so I only had to milk and catch up on all of the chores waiting for me on my own farm. This went on for a couple of months until his help returned from the south.
After this, it became know around the county that I was an experienced milker and began being a relief milker for dairyman in the county that had to go out of town for one reason or another. I then went on to be a tester for the states' Dairy Herd Improvement Association which involved going to all of the dairies in the surrounding counties once a month and taking milk samples from each cow, twice a day, one from each milking, and sending them off to be tested for protein and milkfat content. Now all dairies milk their cows twice a day but they don't all chose to do it at the same times. There was one dairy that liked to milk at eleven AM and eleven PM so that they could watch the Tonight Show on a television that they had in the milking parlor. I would come home at three in the morning and find my wife sitting in a rocking chair nursing our daughter as I would sort milk samples and prepare them for shipping to the state agricultural lab. These had to be without a doubt the hardest times that I ever worked but they were the most happy and satisfying times of my life. I felt like I was doing something and was beng productive and definitely providing for my family.
Enough of this segue, none of this is what I had envisioned in my youth. I have been lucky enough to find happiness in the jobs that I have done. I felt great compassion for this young lady as she sat in the bar and dicussed her options with a local college professor. He gave her what I cosidered to be very good advice. Follow her heart and not necessarily your expectations of a future bank balance in deciding what she wanted to do with her life. Take some time off if necessary to discover what she really wanted to do with her life. Education is way too expensive these days to waste on unwanted degrees. I do not know what her decision will be but he left her with the advice of "Don't worry, be happy in what you do in life and what you do." It has worked for him and it has worked for me. We are all on this planet for much to short a time to spend most of it being unhappy.